Different America - "Gap between national promise and national reality"
My friend got me this from a used book store for my birthday last year. It is really what got me started on my recent reading. The book is about black writing going from slave narratives to Ralph Elison and Richard Wright. What hit me hardest at first was reading up close what southern slavery was like and how it was justified by southerners and southern preachers. This sent me into learning about the origin of the civil war (listening to David Blight's lectures and now reading Bruce Levine). Reading about all the myths and false narratives spun about black people to justify enslavement and how the black slaves had to engage actively in deception to stay alive (pretending to be loyal and faithful for better survival). That is what "masking" is. In the second part of the book he takes up Harlem renascence writers--Chesnut, Johnson, Thurman, Larsen, and Toomer. I took a long break between part 1 and two and read some of their works and read about the Harlem renascence as we